We’ve been thrilled with the all support we’ve been getting from users who are helping us rate the tempo of music tracks in our Speedo experiment, thanks! Now we’d like to ask you to help us with another fun music experiment for a new project called Audio Flowers. We are currently doing some research into new techniques to measure structural change (or “complexity”) in rhythm, harmony and timbre directly from mp3 files. The measurements we take from a song are then summarised to produce a little image: an Audio Flower like the one below.
That’s why at Last.fm we’ve programmed our computers to listen to music. We fed them around 15,000 tracks from the UK singles charts between 1960 and 2008 and discovered some fascinating results we’d like to share with you. It all starts with the discovery that just before the middle of the 70s something in the data changed…